I don’t find either example convincing about the general point. Since I’m stupid I’ll fail to spot that the mouse example uses fictional evidence and is best ignored
We are all pretty sick of seeing a headline “Cure for Alzheimer’s disease!!!” and clicking through to the article only to find that it is cured in mice, knock-out mice, with a missing gene, and therefore suffering from a disease a little like human Alzheimer. The treatment turns out to be injecting them with the protein that the missing gene codes for. Relevance to human health: zero.
Mice are very short lived. We expect big boosts in life span by invoking mechanisms already present in humans and already working to provide humans with much longer life spans than mice. We don’t expect big boosts in the life span of mice to herald very much for human health. Cats would be different. If pet cats started living 34 years instead of 17, their owners would certainly be saying “I want what Felix is getting.”
The sophistication of AI is a tricky thing to measure. I think that we are safe from unfriendly AI for a few years yet, not so much because humans suck at programming computers, but because they suck in a particular way. Some humans can sit at a keyboard typing in hundreds of thousands of lines of code specific to a particular challenge and achieve great things. We can call that sophistication if we like, but it isn’t going to go foom. The next big challenge requires a repeat of the heroic efforts, and generates another big pile of worn out keyboards. We suck at programming in the sense that we need to spend years typing in the code ourselves, we cannot write code that writes code.
Original visions of AI imagined a positronic brain in an anthropomorphic body. The robot could drive a car, play a violin, cook dinner, and beat you at chess. It was general purpose.
If one saw the distinction between special purpose and general purpose as the key issue, one might wonder: what would failure look like? I think the original vision would fail if one had separate robots, one for driving cars and flying airplanes, a second for playing musical instruments, a third to cook and clean, and fourth to play games such as chess, bridge, and baduk.
We have separate hand-crafted computer programs for chess and bridge and baduk. That is worse than failure.
Examples the other way.
After the Wright brothers people did believe in powered, heavier-than-air flight. Aircraft really took of after that. One crappy little hop in the most favourable weather and suddenly every-one’s a believer.
Sputnik. Dreamers had been building rockets since the 1930′s, and being laughed at. The German V2 was no laughing matter, but it was designed to crash into the ground and destroy things, which put an ugh field around thinking about what it meant. Then comes 1957. Beep, beep, beep! Suddenly every-one’s a believer and twelve years later Buzz Aldrin and the other guy are standing on the moon :-)
The Battle of Cambrai is two examples of people “getting it”. First people understood before the end of 1914 that the day of the horse-mounted cavalry charge was over. The Hussites had war wagons in 1420 so there was a long history of rejecting that kind of technology. But after event W1 (machine guns and barbed wire defeating horses) it only took three years before the first tank-mounted cavalry charge. I think we tend to miss understand this by measuring time in lives lost rather than in years. Yes, the adoption of armoured tanks was very slow if you count the delay in lives, but it couldn’t have come much faster in months.
The second point is that first world war tanks were crap. The Cambrai salient was abandoned. The tanks were slow and always broke down, because they were too heavy and yet the armour was merely bullet proof. There only protection against artillery was that the gun laying techniques of the time were ill suited to moving targets. The deployment of tanks in the first world war fall short of being the critical event W. One expects the horrors of trench warfare to fade and military doctrine to go back to horses and charges in brightly coloured uniforms.
In reality the disappointing performance of the tanks didn’t cause military thinkers to miss their significance. Governments did believe and developed doctrines of Blitzkreig and Cruiser tanks. Even a weak W can turn every-one into believers.
I don’t find either example convincing about the general point. Since I’m stupid I’ll fail to spot that the mouse example uses fictional evidence and is best ignored
We are all pretty sick of seeing a headline “Cure for Alzheimer’s disease!!!” and clicking through to the article only to find that it is cured in mice, knock-out mice, with a missing gene, and therefore suffering from a disease a little like human Alzheimer. The treatment turns out to be injecting them with the protein that the missing gene codes for. Relevance to human health: zero.
Mice are very short lived. We expect big boosts in life span by invoking mechanisms already present in humans and already working to provide humans with much longer life spans than mice. We don’t expect big boosts in the life span of mice to herald very much for human health. Cats would be different. If pet cats started living 34 years instead of 17, their owners would certainly be saying “I want what Felix is getting.”
The sophistication of AI is a tricky thing to measure. I think that we are safe from unfriendly AI for a few years yet, not so much because humans suck at programming computers, but because they suck in a particular way. Some humans can sit at a keyboard typing in hundreds of thousands of lines of code specific to a particular challenge and achieve great things. We can call that sophistication if we like, but it isn’t going to go foom. The next big challenge requires a repeat of the heroic efforts, and generates another big pile of worn out keyboards. We suck at programming in the sense that we need to spend years typing in the code ourselves, we cannot write code that writes code.
Original visions of AI imagined a positronic brain in an anthropomorphic body. The robot could drive a car, play a violin, cook dinner, and beat you at chess. It was general purpose.
If one saw the distinction between special purpose and general purpose as the key issue, one might wonder: what would failure look like? I think the original vision would fail if one had separate robots, one for driving cars and flying airplanes, a second for playing musical instruments, a third to cook and clean, and fourth to play games such as chess, bridge, and baduk.
We have separate hand-crafted computer programs for chess and bridge and baduk. That is worse than failure.
Examples the other way.
After the Wright brothers people did believe in powered, heavier-than-air flight. Aircraft really took of after that. One crappy little hop in the most favourable weather and suddenly every-one’s a believer.
Sputnik. Dreamers had been building rockets since the 1930′s, and being laughed at. The German V2 was no laughing matter, but it was designed to crash into the ground and destroy things, which put an ugh field around thinking about what it meant. Then comes 1957. Beep, beep, beep! Suddenly every-one’s a believer and twelve years later Buzz Aldrin and the other guy are standing on the moon :-)
The Battle of Cambrai is two examples of people “getting it”. First people understood before the end of 1914 that the day of the horse-mounted cavalry charge was over. The Hussites had war wagons in 1420 so there was a long history of rejecting that kind of technology. But after event W1 (machine guns and barbed wire defeating horses) it only took three years before the first tank-mounted cavalry charge. I think we tend to miss understand this by measuring time in lives lost rather than in years. Yes, the adoption of armoured tanks was very slow if you count the delay in lives, but it couldn’t have come much faster in months.
The second point is that first world war tanks were crap. The Cambrai salient was abandoned. The tanks were slow and always broke down, because they were too heavy and yet the armour was merely bullet proof. There only protection against artillery was that the gun laying techniques of the time were ill suited to moving targets. The deployment of tanks in the first world war fall short of being the critical event W. One expects the horrors of trench warfare to fade and military doctrine to go back to horses and charges in brightly coloured uniforms.
In reality the disappointing performance of the tanks didn’t cause military thinkers to miss their significance. Governments did believe and developed doctrines of Blitzkreig and Cruiser tanks. Even a weak W can turn every-one into believers.